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Friday, February 5, 2016

A Fist Full of Saffron! A Mouth Full of Shit!

DDGD February 6, 2016

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Today’s
Post is brought to you by…The
Saffron Guild: A group of fundamentally shitty people who try to hide their
basic shittiness through deployment of colorful imagery and flowery language. Guild
members, AKA the Saffrogettes (even though the majority of them are men),
specialize in attending the signing ceremonies of any deal struck with the
devil, hailing it as breakthrough, and castigating its critics.

The Delirica

The Search for Hope and Safety:We are told that EU officials
are only now discovering that most of the “refugees” whom
they had welcomed into their countries are actually not refugees at all, but
are, in fact, the long heralded and dreaded economic migrants:
those hideous creatures whose eventual appearance onto the historical scene has
long been predicted by certain sociologists and economists. Yes, those
end-of-days creatures are now pouring into Europe, following the same treacherous trek as refugees. But
they are not in search of mere safety, as the refugees seek, but rather better
economic opportunities, ones that are not available in their countries of
origin, for whatever reason.

The impulse to separate economic
migrants from real refugees is understandable to a point. Many people feel
compassion for the plight of refugees and want to try to accommodate
them, even if only on a temporary basis or until circumstances allow
them to return home. But they resist the idea of affording economic
migrants that same benevolent treatment. The burden of this group’s economic
expectations, they suggest, is something their own governments, not ours,
should shoulder—even if those governments happen to be unfair,
unrepresentative, and incompetent at economic management. If our doors are open
to migrants from North Africa, Europeans wonder, why not to every person in the
world who thinks quite rightly he would have a better life here?

The problem is that people are
not so reasonable when it comes to managing their expectations and sitting
still for their allotment in life—accepting that being born in Algeria or
Tunisia does not confer the same opportunities as being born a boat ride away
in Italy. Nor do human expectations neatly sort into separate packages—the
economic versus the political—to be handled by different agencies. Nor are our
destinies, or our economics, so separate that the impact of certain
developments “there” can be kept “there.”

Things have always been far more
complex than that. In the modern globalized world, there is no Las Vegas
principle—what happens there does not stay there… (Continue
Reading the Article)

Here is what Putin
said last year to the UN General Assembly: "Instead of the triumph of
democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster — and
nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life. I cannot
help asking those who have forced that situation: Do you realize what you have
done?" And he was pointing at us.

In a sense, Putin is
saying what some self-styled realists in the United States say: that by trying
to remake the world in our democratic image, America is actually making
everything worse.

Here is the problem,
I think, with that argument: It wasn’t the United States that gave all those
people from the Middle East to Ukraine to Burma to Burundi the idea that their
governments should serve them instead of stealing from them.

Yes, it’s true that
ideals that we professed have inspired those people in many places; legal norms
we have helped to forge over many years have empowered many of those people.
But it was they who decided to remake their worlds in their image of what a
just society demands.

This is a very important comment
by Mr. Malinowski, because there are lots of people out here, realists and
leftists intellectuals as well as autocratic leaders and their apologists, who
often ignore the fact that demands for democracy and respect for human rights
are homegrown, and that there exists a growing indigenous constituency for
these ideals whose rights is being trampled underfoot and whose plight is being
ignored by all those anti-war advocates and all those limited to
no-intervention realists.

Be that as it may, the autocrats
and the realists can congratulate themselves for now: they have won the current
showdown against the democratic forces, and have momentum on their side. Just
don’t expect the world to be better for it, even if the price of oil is on the
decline and we seem poised to move beyond dependency on fossil fuel. There is
an inherent latent cost to indifference and narrowmindedness, and we will have
to face the music soon enough.

Complicit
Not Conned:Syria:
What Next? This piece by Fred Hoff is excellent except when it comes to tis
analysis how badly the U.S. fucked up in regard to its Syria policy, but I take
issue with its underlying assumption throughout that the Obama administration
was repeatedly “gulled” by Moscow. I don’t believe the Administration was
gulled.

At this stage, I cannot see
around the conclusion that the administration is a silent partner in the
current scheme unfolding in Syria, with the Russians and Iranians doing the
dirty work which the Administration cannot do but of which it amply approves. This
policy is more about betrayal than gullibility, and it’s not simply Syrian
rebels who are being betrayed but American values, the very ones that the
President defends to a domestic audience. I believe that the plan being currently
implemented is to allow for the Russians and the Iranians to defeat the rebels,
yes, even those once reluctantly backed by the West, thus restoring the regime's
control over the western parts of Syria, while the U.S. and its allies focus on
fighting the Islamic State in the eastern parts of the country as well as in
Iraq. Then, at some hapless point in the future, once the goals are achieved or
sufficient progress has been made in this regard, Bashar Al-Assad might be
removed, one way or another, albeit probably through a convenient car bomb
attack, in order to make the situation more acceptable to the international
community.

In many ways, the realists seem
comfortable allowing states like Russia and Iran to play such “stabilizing”
roles in the future, and to bear its material costs. For some reason, the return
to relevance of such illiberal states doesn’t seem to scare them, because America’s
military and economic superiority remains unassailable at this stage, while the
economies of most these states are in tatters, and their armies, though strong,
remain far from constituting a serious threat to America itself. The fact that such
developments pose existential threats to some of America’s traditional allies
doesn’t seem to bother the realist camp. The fact that the aspirations of so
many people for democracy will be crushed, and are, in fact, being crushed, by these illiberal forces matters
even less. Theirs is a dream indefinitely deferred, and is not something that
realists care very much for anyway.

The assumption
that Russia may not enjoy any victory in Syria and Ukraine for too long, as its
economy continues to teeter on the verge of collapse, an assumption widely held
by realists, and with which I tend to agree, with some reservations, should, in
fact, compel the administration to stand up to Putin, not appease him. Why
appease a loser? Why not hasten his fall? Why not work to cultivate new
alliances by facilitating democratic transition in Syria? The simple answer is:
the Obama Administration is too risk averse, and will not embark on such
undertakings without guarantees. Many would argue this stand in itself all but
guarantees chaos and failure, and increases risks on the longer run. But a
myopic administration can live with that.

The
Missing Tidbit:Government
Forces, Backed by Russian Jets, Advance in Syria. There is an interesting
little tidbit of a fact missing from current coverage of “the Assad regime” or
“government forces” advances” in northern Aleppo, and other parts of Syria:
it’s simply not the regime (or the government) that is advancing. What’s
actually advancing is a motley assortment of Shia militias from Iran, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Iraq and Lebanon (Hezbollah), funded by Iran and many were trained
there, backed by Russian carpet bombing and tanks, led by Russian and IRGC
generals, and supported when necessary by Russian commandos. There are few
Alawite officers there for sure to act as liaisons with the local population,
and to appear on state TV to announce victory, real and imagined, but whose
role in the actual fighting has largely become symbolic at this stage. Those
who ignore this little tidbit are simply blinding themselves to what the future
holds for Syria.

For if this is how victory is to
be achieved in Syria, and considering that all
these victories are leading to mass dislocation of the mostly Sunni population,
then, basically, the Western parts of Syria are being gradually transformed
into an Iranian/Russian colony, stretching from Aleppo and Latakia in the
North, to Daraa and Suweida in the South, with some strips along the borders
with Israel, Jordan and Turkey left under local control with support from said
neighbors. To the East, Kurdish and Arab tribes will establish their control,
after defeating IS, with U.S. backing and possible involvement by Saudi and
Arab forces. It might still take a couple of years before this scenario is
finalized, and the fate of Idlib and certain parts of central Syria may not be
resolved for years to come, but things seem to be heading in this
direction.

Neither
a dervish nor a puppeteer: In all this, and to go back to the
assumption that Obama Administration has been or is being “gulled” by Putin,
it’s true that the President himself might at times appear as a sad and haggard
dervish who lost his will to whirl, but, the fact is that he remains far more
involved in the current state of global affairs to be thought of as being a
dupe. The world is still, in part at least, dancing to his rhythms, but he is
no longer the maestro. In fact, the entire orchestra has no maestro at this
stage, which is why everybody seems to be playing off-tempo, to the
bewilderment of the audience. Still, some diehards, the realists and their ilk
to be specific, might prefer to think of the new composition as representing a bold
new experiment of sorts, a “Marteau
San Maître” Part Deux if you will. If so, then, Pierre Boulez and Klemens
von Metternich must be rolling in their respective graves.

Quote of the Day

“Any plan conceived in moderation must fail when the
circumstances are set in extremes.” –Klemens von
Metternich

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